


clown man found half dead in miami, promises never to do it again, lies

by huffspuffsblows



Series: opened at gunpoint at a local mcdonalds [7]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, no beta we do not die, this is actually what happened what are you saying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29796438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/huffspuffsblows/pseuds/huffspuffsblows
Summary: Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.Father and son reunite, sides are traced but not quite drawn. Rosinante and Sengoku.
Relationships: Donquixote "Corazon" Rosinante & Sengoku the Buddha
Series: opened at gunpoint at a local mcdonalds [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1826923
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	clown man found half dead in miami, promises never to do it again, lies

**Author's Note:**

> Glad this is actually what happened in canon and he's alive in Wano somewhere.

  
  
When you wake up the world will not be what it was and neither will you. A nice sentiment for a guy who didn’t think he’d wake up again period— He thinks it was a line in a book once, when a tragedy befalls the hero and it’s up to him to tear the world to pieces to save some semblance of what was— or to let the shape of the world cling, like clay, to more responsible hands.

[a potter’s wheel can dive out of control with just a spin; that’s a lot of pressure]

Rosinante isn’t a potter and he isn’t a hero. He’s just a man who couldn’t damn his own brother. He’s a spy and an officer, an upstanding man in the guise of a pirate in the guise of a clown in the guise of an honest man. He is a dead man. The beeps and whistles and filtered, freezing air of a hospital room greet his skin as consciousness swims to the surface. It’s blissfully silent other than that. And other than something else he’s never been able to shake, has not wanted to [still thinks of with such fondness it’s nearly palpable between his fingers, curled close]—

Sengoku has and always will be tone-deaf. It doesn’t matter if its songs crooned to a sleepy goat or a trembling, wailing little boy with no home to return to other than a burned-out little hut and the shape of his brother in his soul, ripped away by violence. Rosinante used to [and still does on occasion] think his foster father could hang the moon with just a touch— except hold a tune.

“—every time. You keep pushing and pushing with no regard to your own safety—I lied when I said it was the making of a good officer. I lied when it came to you. I always lie when it comes to you…” His father’s voice breaks for the first time Rosinante can remember.

[it always does when it comes to him; he’s the reason for many exceptions]

He almost doesn’t recognize the croak of his own ill-used voice. “Is Phil in here? You normally don’t say such nice things unless it’s to that goat…or if I’m unconscious.”

Through bleary eyes, he can see a shape come to fruition: his father’s tear-streaked face hovering over his bed. The soft skin of his frowning mouth stretches above the muscle twitching there, Rosinante can see it beneath the fluorescents. Sengoku has never struck him a day in his life but he can almost read it in his eyes, the frustration—and he’d accept it.

He’d lied to him. The first [and not only] lie he’d told him. [He’d do it again and again and again for that lion child, that broken boy, that soldered in steel and hurt and rising-from-ashes boy]

“I’ll accept whatever punish—” Instead of taking him by the shoulders and shaking the stitches out of him Sengoku lays a gentle, warm palm over his forehead to sweep the messy, sweaty strands of hair from his face.

[Truly a Buddha looking down on him]

They silently gaze at one another [at what they could have lost, snuffed out in an instant]. Rosinante’s eyes feel hot behind the sockets, his whole face feels hot. Sengoku clearly has something on his mind.

“What is it?” he prompts the Fleet Admiral.  
“I think this is the first time I’ve seen your forehead in four years…”  
“And?”  
A choked off, sob-laugh. “And you look twelve.”

Rosinante nearly breaks down right there. No, he does, this isn’t leftover fluid from the IV spurting from his eyes, those are tears. He thought he’d cried all of them in the past 12 hours—

He nearly sits up with numb arms, chest burning in agony, alarms beeping in the background— [a little boy who cries into the brim of his own hat until it’s soaked through, clutched between white knuckles]

“La—where’s—”

His father pushes him back down to the pillows with that gentle hand. Firm. It silences him, rusty red gazing into dark brown. He doesn't know he's waiting on a word [one again as a subordinate].

“Lay there!” Is the word. Two of them. An order. “Just…lay there. You nearly—” died.  
That doesn’t scare Rosinante—

What scares him is what would be left behind.

Sengoku takes a deep breath. “If I did know anything—which I don’t and I’m not admitting that I do—I’d tell you. You know that, right?”

Rosinante swallows his protests, his wheedling, his shouts to just _go look for_ \--

[is that a bullet in your heart that shifts or is that guilt in your soul, Rosinante?]

“Ah. I do.”

The last thing he sees before he slips back into troubled sleep is his father’s face hooded in the armament of the Fleet Admiral. And for the first time, it isn’t the reassuring weight.

But he turns his cheek into the warm palm that strokes his face anyway. Rosinante believes him because Sengoku would never lie to him.


End file.
